Deploying SQL Server
on vSAN
If you’re like most, Microsoft SQL Server
plays a vital role in your organization.SQL
Server is your hub of data and it requires
high performing, and flexible storage
solutions that can scale as your data
needs grow. However, this can be costly.
Add to this, time spent on routine mainte-
nance processes, complex management
of three-tier infrastructure and you get a
time consuming and expensive solution.
Many organizations spend
valuable time on routine
manual tasks. Consolidating
the infrastructure ensures that
SQL Server runs successfully and
cuts manual task time down. IDC
research shows that up to 45% of a typical
admin’s time is spent on manual tasks
(Source: IDC November 2016 HCI Adoption Trends, Use Cases
& Market Growth Report Series).
™
So, if you want to deploy SQL Server or
upgrade your current SQL Server to the
next version, it makes sense to also update
your infrastructure. Doing so allows you to
evaluate your business as a whole for today,
tomorrow, and beyond. And your applica-
tion capabilities play a large part of that.
A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is
ideal for powering all your business-critical
applications, including Microsoft SQL
Server. It’s a long-term, scalable solution
that puts you in a strong position for
whatever technological and customer
shifts lie ahead for your organization—
including adoption of a Cloud Foundation
platform, that makes adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy seamless. From higher
performance and lower costs, to reliev-
ing the burden of manual tasks on your
IT team, it simply makes sense.
Why the Need for Hyper-
converged Infrastructure?
Organizations are looking for ways to
better align their infrastructure with
their Microsoft SQL database initiatives
and requirements, as it has become costlier
every year to satisfy the real-time needs
of any business with the traditional
three-tier infrastructure.
Your team needs a solution that can
easily scale to meet the constant growth
of data, enable performance that aligns
to end user expectations, provide always-
on availability, integrate seamlessly with
public cloud environments, reduce costs,
and enable faster, more flexible deploy-
ments.
HCI makes it easier for you
to deploy and scale highly
available and performant
enterprise database
applications, such as SQL.
The HCI Solution: VMware vSAN™
The vSAN storage model offers a software-
defined hyperconverged infrastructure
approach that reduces the cost of acquiring
and operating storage, as outlined in the
table.
Costs Benefits
Acquisition Avoid proprietary storage hardware
(CapEx) lock-in and associated costs for
dedicated storage adapters (Fibre
Channel HBAs), as well as requirement
for fabric hardware
Manage your overall costs based
on server-side economics — server
components (hardware) competitively
priced versus traditional external
arrays (hardware + software)
Lower upfront costs with granular
scaling
Leverage falling storage costs year-
on-year
Benefit from higher resource
utilization through
Simplify budgeting, forecasting,
and capacity planning
Operation Merge vSphere® and storage admin-
(OpEx) istrative roles and reduce operational
costs
Improve daily task efficiency through
higher admin productivity and simple
automation
Simplify deployment and reduce
footprint
Simplify budgeting
Lower the cost of specialized
operational skillsets (labor costs)
Streamline and simplify automation
Reduce power and cooling costs
Benefits of vSAN™ with SQL
Server
When you consolidate your infrastructure
with vSAN and SQL Server, you see
• Lower total cost of ownership:
Reduced TCO by up to 50 percent
by leveraging server-side HDDs and
SSDs to create a converged and
resilient shared storage solution
within the hypervisor.
•L
 ower capital expenditures:
Server-side enterprise storage
economics lowers capital expenses
over array-based solutions.
• Lower operational expenses:
Automation, power and cooling,
$/TB, and labor costs. With vSphere
integration, current vSphere and
storage skillsets can be used to
manage the technology.
Management that is more
efficient also lowers oper-
ating expenses, which has
the potential for significant
overall operational expense
savings.
• Predictability: No large upfront
investments. vSAN allows you to
scale granularly, and avoid overpro-
visioning and overpaying for future
capacity and performance needs.
By deploying SQL on vSAN, customers
gain performance due to vSAN’s native
vSphere architecture that provides
optimal resource utilization for all your
most critical applications. vSAN delivers
higher flash performance, enabling more
than 150K IOPS per host. Customers
can also expect predictable and highly
available SQL Server OLTP performance,
and a simple design methodology, which
also eliminates the operational and main-
tenance complexity of traditional SAN.
With vSAN, you get unified
management across all your
deployments—from edge to
cloud—with the same tools
you use in the core data center,
removing significant barriers to hybrid
cloud adoption.
In addition, you can tailor your
application demand by
• Adjusting with Storage Policy Based
Management (SPBM)
• Improving resource utilization
through workload consolidation,
from both performance and capacity
considerations
• Protecting your SQL deployment
with rich vSAN data services and
high availability configurations
There is also ease of management and
deployment flexibility when you deploy
SQL on vSAN.
The Value of the VMware
Stack for SQL
When you want to modernize your
existing SQL Server environment, you
can leverage vSAN and take advantage
of the full solution, by moving all intel-
ligence and management into a single
software stack, and allow a VM-and
application-centric policy-based control
and automation.
vCenter® allows you to manage your
vSphere environment and your HCI
environment. In-depth performance
monitoring is provided via a Performance
Monitoring tool: vRealize® Operations
Native Management Pack, which provides
operations management across physical,
virtual and cloud environments. With
VMware vMotion®, organizations can
non-disruptively consolidate SQL Server
databases to ease migrations, while
StoragePolicy-BasedManagement (SPBM)
allows for unified control plane across all
storage services. VMware powered HCI
allow simple evolution to full stack via
broadest deployment options.
For Dummies is a trademark of John WiIey & Sons, Inc.
Conclusion
It’s time to consolidate your infrastructure
and implement a solution that allows you
to meet your SQL Server needs so
you can make fast and sound business
desicions. HCI powered by VMware vSAN
allows you to create a cloud foundation that
will help futureproof your infrastructure.
As the industry-leading HCI solution,
VMware vSAN is natively integrated with
VMware vSphere. Combined, they provide
a cohesive, seamless platform for the
applications driving your business.
The tightly coupled combination of
VMware vSphere as the virtualization
layer and VMware vSAN as the HCI
platform has enabled organizations to
easily and quickly deploy and/or migrate
their virtualized SQL Server databases to
a cost-effective infrastructure that meets
the ongoing performance, scalability,
and reliability requirements of a mission
critical database.
To learn more, see Hyperconverged
Infrastructure For Dummies.
ISBN: 978-1-119-064610-5